This is an intriguing discussion we're having because I've been put in the strange position of seeming to defend the US political system even though I've written dozens upon dozens of highly critical articles on US culture and politics. I've been put in this position because I wrote what I regard as a tautology or a truism, which is that every social system has its upside and its downside.
That's a very interesting example you gave about the music scene benefiting from the suffering of the American poor. You can go back to jazz and the blues as being based on the African American experience of slavery. Great art is indeed often a way of coping with suffering because necessity is the mother of invention.
I take it this is an unintended effect of American individualism (i.e. of its quasi-social Darwinism). The struggle for survival, out of respect for everyone's individual "liberty" means that lots will fail in the race to the top. But the losers often cope by sublimating their pain with great art. And indeed, America leads the world in entertainment. Is that not a trade-off, in an imperfect world?
An even better example, to make your point, would be Brazil's world leadership in mixed martial arts because the poor who grow up in slums in Brazil naturally learn how to excel in fighting to defend themselves. That too is a trade-off or compensation for Brazil's political and economic faults. But that's not to say that all trade-offs are worth it.
My truism was just that there are typically trade-offs. You seem to have taken me, though, for a closeted propagandist for the American system. I can assure you I'm no such thing. I was just musing that a winner-take-all government approximates a dictatorship, which has some strengths. Witness the global backlash against neoliberal democracies. Witness the rise of China and how Russia punches above its weight class. Again, these top-down systems also have tremendous downsides that likely outweigh their upsides, especially in peacetime and over the long run. Nevertheless, autocracy is the human norm, and liberal democracy is a relatively recent experiment that may end up being a dead end. (Witness Trumpism.)
I suspect that if democracy will prove to be sustainable in the run, as a check on our authoritarian instincts, it will be because of dramatic advances in technology which will transform the economic base of developed societies.
But again, I'm only musing here. I'm not an expert on any of this. You do seem, though, oddly intolerant of my musings. I've just been trying to see where you're coming from on this. Just how anti-American are you?
